Sunday, October 30, 2016

Yard Sign Considerations

Ours wasn’t the only Clinton-Kaine yard sign that was stolen
the other day.In addition to our
neighbors directly across the road, two others were taken just on this short
stretch of our road, making for a total of eight pilfered of the signs that
G. had posted in this part of the county. The Republican Trump-Pence signs, of course,
hadn’t been touched.

Since then, my wife, who works in the Democratic office in
the county seat, has gotten two replacement signs, one for us and one for our
neighbors.But I am being slow to display
ours, because I’m still considering strategies. It would damage my faith in my
fellow citizens in this usually quite civil county even more if another sign
was snatched just as quickly, which I believe would be sure to happen, so
unusually fierce is the Republican antagonism this time around, all because
this time they have a candidate who is tripping bigtime, and the numerous
sniffs that he emitted during the debates were only one of the factors that
testified to his condition and possibly also to the sources of his feverish and
disjointed states of mind.

One strategy that I considered was to show my sign only in
the daytime, as I was certain that the thefts had occurred at night.But then G.K. told me that all his signs
were taken in the middle of the day!

Still I decided that the new sign wasn’t doing any good
lying in my disabled pickup truck, and at around noon yesterday I set it up in
a big oak half-barrel that normally holds only part of our impatiens flower
collection and that sits just off the road up at the head of our somewhat steep
driveway. There I could still check on
it from way down at the bottom of the driveway, across from my workshop, which
I did throughout the rest of the day, until, near sunset, I went up and brought
the sign back down to the truck, for the night.Today I plan to again set it in the impatiens tub first thing in the
morning, and leave it there all day.

G.K. said that he had installed what is called a “game camera”
to keep an eye on his sign, and after 4 or 5 days, when both his sign and the
camera could have been taken, they hadn’t been touched.But I had only now even heard of game
cameras, which apparently are mostly used so that people can watch the wild animal
life on their property from their homes or even from their offices at work, and
I don’t have such a nicety of modern tech.

Though I’m not supposed to be getting on a ladder of any
kind and going up any height, I have nevertheless been giving strong consideration
to bringing a ladder up there and hanging my sign from one of the tree branches
that reach almost over the edge of the road.Yard sign vandals have been known to rip the plastic off the wire frames
in that case, but this would at least force them to haul their vastly over-sized
behinds out of their cars and find some way to reach that high.

In any case, in this silent discussion that I’ve been having
with the thugs, if my sign in the oak tub is also ripped off by some Trump
supporter with severe anger issues for which he should seek help,I’ll just get one more replacement and start
displaying it only on Nov 4, four days before the voting.

Meanwhile I am highly aggrieved that I feel it necessary to
go through all this, when I, on the other hand, have never even thought of
tampering with anyone’s yard sign.Nor
have I contemplated or done anything else of that kind during a very long
lifetime, except state my opinions in no uncertain terms on this blog, which no
one but me ever sees, though Blogger does say that it gets a few page views
every day.But no comments are ever left
here, which I guess is just as well.

The Trumpistas would be highly gratified if they knew of how
easily their criminal acts aggrieve me, so I am only left with never wishing
them well.

Actually people would be surprised if they knew how often
that really works for me, and in a number of ways!